Next.js static export mode produces pure HTML/CSS/JS bundles that can be served from any static hosting provider. This article shares lessons learned from deploying a large Next.js static export to S3 and CloudFront. We cover incremental builds, CloudFront cache strategies, sitemap and RSS generation, image optimization tradeoffs, dynamic route generation, and how to handle authentication in a static-only context. The article also addresses common pitfalls like the lack of ISR support and how to work around them with on-demand rebuilds triggered from the backend.